Just to complicate the whole expat/ ex expat thing a bit, one of my grandmothers was actually from Austria. Although she had already been living in Germany many many years by the time I was born, it meant a lot of family holidays in Austria visiting relatives while I was a kid. And they have some really delicious food over there.

One of my favourites is Nockerln, which is basically pasta for lazy people. Well, not really, but it’s got all the ingredients of pasta dough, but instead of rolling it out and going through all those other pasta making steps, you just drop teaspoons of the dough into boiling hot water and they turn into very tasty if somewhat mishapen pasta dough balls.

This recipe is actually from my mum. It’s the first time I tried making it with gluten free flour, and it turned out just fine. It was a big hit with the boy too – he gobbled up his portion and then ate about half of ours too (at least that’s what it felt like^).

Ingredients

250g gluten free flour

a good pinch of salt

4 medium sized eggs

a quarter of a cup of water

Directions

Sieve the flour into a bowl.

Make a well in the middle and add the water.

Work a little bit of the flour in to the middle and mix it with the water.

Repeat this process with the four eggs.

If the dough becomes too tough, beat it into submission with a wooden spoon.

If your dough seems to dry once you’ve worked in all the eggs, add a little more water. If it seems to wet, add another sprinkling of flour.

Boil a large pan of water, then using two teaspoons, drop teaspoonfuls of dough into the water. You will need two teaspoons so you can use one of them to scrape/ push the dough off the other teaspoon as you will NOT want to use your fingers for this over a pan of boiling water! If you have a mug of hot water standing by that you can dip the teaspoons in between, it makes the dough come off more easily.

Once you’ve used up all the dough, take the pan off the heat and leave the dough balls in the hot water for another 5-10 minutes.

The Nockerln taste great with a simple tomato sauce. I made a quick Napoli sauce here with a tin of passata, a teaspoon of stock powder, a teaspoon of dried oregano and a teaspoon of dried basil. Add some freshly ground pepper to taste, and a pinch of sugar to bring out the flavour of the tomato.